The surveillance state is growing more sinister every day (especially in the UK), but the efforts are somewhat thwarted by the existence of VPNs.

Once they find a way to undermine VPNs, the UK govt will have literal CCP-level control over our access to information and communication.

People don’t use social media in the same way they did ten years ago.

And in any case, they’re still getting massive viewership on X by most people’s standards, surely?

I’m not convinced “X is declining” is a good faith argument here.

Turns out the quality of things like self hosted spam filtering is no match for the world’s most notorious data ingestion and analysis company

I'd rather use Google's web storage than my own. I don't have the time nor the expertise to implement multi-region replication etc.

I understand that granting Google access to one's emails might be a dealbreaker for journalists, dissidents etc, though - so clearly Gmail is no good if you have legitimate need for PGP.

Roads were never intended for people on flimsy two wheeled contraptions with nothing more than a polystyrene cap to protect them.

Gaza doesn't get a free pass to fire rockets at Israeli towns, invade it, and massacre thousands of its civilians on the basis that Gaza's population is allegedly 50% children.

In your world view, at what point would Israel be entitled to fight back against Gaza? How many Nova Festivals before Israel is allowed to defend itself?

And what is Israel allowed to do, bearing in mind Gaza's government urges its civilians to "bare their chests" to Israel (i.e. act as human shields), and Gaza bases military assets in schools and hospitals (well documented)?

I'm interested to know which of my arguments has been "debunked"?

Iran is losing a war it started (by attacking Israel with hundreds of missiles, attacking civilian shipping, sponsoring terror groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis who commit regular attrocities).

These wars are "total wars." Total war is the only option left to Israel and its allies, because as long as Hamas and the Ayatollah regime exists (with their written and well-documented aim to "annihilate" Israel and Jews), then Israeli civilians face an existential threat. The last remaining Jewish nation faces an existential threat. This is a direct consequence of the rabid anti-semitism that's inbuilt into Islamist regimes.

You are not happy for Israel to win its total wars.

Were you happy for the allies to win WW2? From my PoV, 70K UK civilians lost their lives, vs 2M German civilians. The civilian death toll was massively one-sided. But it was Germany that started a total war, and I hope you and I can agree that it was Germany (with its genocidal anti-semitism among other appalling characteristics) that deserved to lose the war.

(non affiliated - not an advert) I would recommend trying Ground News, which helped me understand the biases within sources, and helped showed me the blindspots in news coverage that I'd missed.

I'd like you to cast your mind back to the acts that started these two horrendous wars - Gaza's genocidal invasion of Israeli towns where they massacred teenagers at a music festival, paraded raped women through the streets of Gaza to the cheers of onlookers, and forced young people to watch as their parents and siblings were blown up with hand grenades.

This isn't hyperbole. This isn't a politicised Western interpretation (a la "truthout.org") - this is an account of the videos shared by Hamas themselves, which were shown to Western journalists.

Hamas had to be stopped by force, and I support Israel's right to defend its own existence. If Hamas wishes to use human shields (as it has outright admitted it does), then the tragic collateral civilian deaths are the responsibility of Hamas.

And in Iran, the systematic rape and torture of young people and LGBT people. The massacre of 30,000+ peaceful protesters. And the outright genocidal intent of its leadership ("Death to America, Death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews").

The Ayatollahs had to be stopped before they built nuclear weapons. There will be tragic collateral civilian deaths, but fewer in the long term than if the IRGC are allowed to continue roaming the streets unchecked.

Supply has increased steadily, approx +200K dwellings per year.

Demand has increased -dramatically- primarily due to mass migration (net +944K people in year ending March 2023).

95% of additional households had a foreign-born Household Reference Person between the years 2010 and 2014. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/62910/html/

No. Optimal for employees and customers, which is, in turn, optimal for society.

Making technology choices based on political ideology rather than merit is bad for the interests of both employees and customers.

The hyperbolic statements in your comment suggest your worldview comes from an online echo chamber. With respect, I think you'd benefit from consuming news from a variety of different sources. Think critically about the biases and agendas of the media.

I suspect none of your favourite media sources mentioned the illegal cluster munitions that Iran used to destroy an Israeli kindergarten (among other civilian buildings) on Saturday: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-us-israel-war-updates-...

War is an ugly business. Outcomes are rarely so pure that we can single out "good guys" and "bad guys". But hopefully once you've examined the facts objectively you'll see that the Israeli government is more ethical than Hamas, and you'll see that the American government (yes, even Orange Man Bad) is better than the Ayatollahs of Iran and their IRGC.

All people who run companies should relish their competition behaving sub-optimally.

Housing is in short supply and the sight of it being reserved for unemployed economic migrants is making me pretty angry.

Of course our national govts have been pretty woeful ever since, but in 2029 we will have the opportunity to vote for genuine, dramatic change, with strong options on both the left and right side of politics.

Regarding the creeping surveillance state, Reform UK have explicitly stated they will repeal the awful Online Safety Act.

This is how we wrestle control back from the establishment.

Turns out the early Model S vehicles used consumer grade LCD panels that weren’t designed for the prolonged high heat you get in a metal and glass box left outside in the sun all day.

Tesla since upgraded their vehicle screens to proper automotive-grade LCDs which are excellent.

My point is, automotive-grade hardware is higher spec than regular consumer computer hardware, hence the high prices.

As an aside, I upgraded my whole computer and screen from MCU1 to MCU2 and it was worth the upgrade.

Credit to Tesla for building a retrofit computer upgrade for old vehicles. Thats a non-trivial thing to engineer and I appreciate their effort. Other car manufacturers would prefer you were compelled to buy their latest vehicle instead.